Purposeful Wanderings - Bradford L. Glass - March 2025
“If you want to control your cow, give it a bigger pasture.”
– Zen Master Suzuki Roshi
“I don’t know.” Three simple words … words that could open a world of new possibility and learning. But we’ve been taught the opposite … we should know it all, we should get it all right, we should avoid mistakes, we should go along with other people’s thinking, we should hide our vulnerability. While these lessons have left us obsessed with trying to control life’s outcomes – a futile pursuit (which, by the way, creates huge stress) – they’ve also left us afraid to say, “I don’t know.” We may think “not knowing” is ok, but our actions say we can’t stand it.
Our world is far too complex for us to know everything, or even enough to make confident choices each day. This isn’t about what we can know but don’t – like the distance to Mars, the population of Fiji, or names of state capitals. It’s about the big issues of our time – how to sustainably steward our planet and its resources; ethical implications of artificial intelligence and the internet; ensuring a well-educated and healthy citizenship; keeping our homes, communities and world safe places to live. These issues are insanely complex, and affect every aspect of our world: science, politics, economics, ethics, law. None can be resolved into “one right answer,” because their complexity defies the level of knowingness that could lead to one answer. Yet they all ask us to be totally present – consciously aware … in this moment; thinking critically … with objective clarity and perspective; open to learning … willingness to be changed by new information. (When was the last time you experienced that?)
So how do we cope? We pretend. Because we’ve been taught to be afraid of not knowing, we pretend we do know. It’s pure delusion, yet every day we deny “not knowing” (which admittedly can be unsettling) and adopt what’s really no more than opinions (our thinking isn’t big enough to do better). But then – to feel “certain” – we proceed to call them facts, which we in turn feel obligated to defend, sometimes aggressively, against “facts” of others (as threats to our delusion). It all becomes a conflict between “my” right answer and “your” right answer … neither of which are answers … or right! It’s an adaptive strategy with awful consequences; questioning stops; thinking stops; and learning stops. Though we may gain comfort by believing a satisfying un-truth over an un-satisfying (or incomplete) truth, we just crawl deeper into the illusion we created. It’s all a result of unconsciously listening to the voices in our heads. And we miss that they’re not “truth,” but merely [loud] echoes of decades-old lessons.
So, now what? If we were to step back to look (objectively), we’d see we’re in not knowing (off course) 90% of the time. It’s “the just way it is!” Given that, I’d favor capacities that could get me back on track, not capacities that keep fooling me into believing I’m right. Old lessons may have prepared us to struggle and fight (in the name of certainty) yet left us totally unprepared to navigate the real world … a world of uncertainty.
Despite all our [concocted] drama, not knowing is our natural human state. It invites our innate curiosity, wonder, desire to learn, creativity (on the inside), and acceptance of chaos, complexity and uncertainty (on the outside). We used these capacities well as children … until we learned not to … when they likely went dormant.
What’s the path forward (or out)? We might start by recognizing that chaos, complexity and uncertainty don’t ask for our judgments, our opinions, or for us to “fix” them. They ask us to learn from them, then respond, using our creative genius, patience and non-judgment. We don’t need to know everything. We just need to keep learning.
A first step might be seeing this with enough clarity to admit it! Next, we might adopt “a culture of not knowing” as an opening to new possibility. Perhaps we need, as Wendell Berry suggests, “a language of ignorance,” one not oriented toward blame, shame or guilt, but rather toward acceptance, openness and learning. What if we could truly learn about what we pretend we know: the secrets of the universe, the magic of consciousness, the mystery life is, depths of our humanness, how to live on this planet peacefully and sustainably? The non-judgment alone would leave us open to a kind of learning we’ve largely shut off today. And it certainly would offer a big reduction in the stress we experience trying to keep others from seeing that we’re pretending all the time.
Exercise:
Accepting Not Knowing, Part 1: In a few moments of quiet reflection each day, recall situations from your day where you felt a “signal of not-knowing-ness.” Look back (now) and notice what was going on (then). When you didn’t know, did you notice that? If so, how did you respond (deny; learn; react emotionally)? Here’s an example: “My boss asked me to do ‘x.’ I had no clue how but was afraid she’d think I couldn’t do my job if I told her. So I pretended. Now I’m even worse off, because she thinks it’s going to get done, but I have no clue how. If I’d just been able to say, ‘Can you help me figure out what you want?’ … things would have been far easier.”
Accepting Not Knowing, Part 2: Claim an hour of quiet time some evening. Ponder what you see as “big truths” in your life … stuff you “just know for sure.” Explore several such “truths.” (Ex: “Life is unfair.”), then ask:
· Do I hold this truth as a result of deep personal inquiry? What thinking or life experience brought me here?
· Does my truth invite/include/accept everyone without judgment/condition? (Or does it shield me from them?)
· What assumptions might I be making that support this belief, yet at the same time block me from new learning?
· How might those who see the world differently answer these questions? (How did they arrive at “their” truth?)
· If I could expand the edges of my thinking far enough to include their thinking, what dialogue might we share?
These aren’t easy questions. They invite deep reflection, not accepting the “first obvious” answer, and willingness to “live in the question” for long enough to learn … and be changed. (This isn’t the kind of questioning you need to solve a math problem.)
Accepting Not Knowing, Part 3: Big questions invite deep inquiry and reflection, both so uncommon that we rarely experience life’s underlying order. A few more big questions that may open you to new possibility:
· What if my mind weren’t already made up about things? What might I discover then? (openness)
· What if I stopped fighting with life, no longer needing to impose my will? What could be possible? (acceptance)
· What if I trusted my inner voice, and allowed it (not my old thought patterns) to guide me? (awareness)
· What if I didn’t have to know how it would all work out, but rather know that it would all work out? (trust)
· What if there were underlying order to life? Am I willing to discover it, then step into its experience? (courage)
· What if I could really live with these questions, every day, as a new way of being? (practice)
Life Lessons from Nature: In nature, “fight or flight” is a first stage response to stress, nature’s way to handle change that occurs too quickly for evolutionary adaptation. A well-known example is the lemming, a small Arctic rodent. When populations grow rapidly (as they do when food is plentiful), overcrowding creates stress … and they resort to fleeing. The [highly misrepresented] tale: lemmings commit suicide by jumping off cliffs. The less dramatic yet truthful story (had the “researcher” been a more careful observer): fleeing en masse, lemmings reach a cliff, and before the one on the edge can say, “oh, shit,” the one behind him pushes him over. And so on. The point is that, in times of stress, “thinking” (to the extent lemmings “think”) is hijacked by unconscious instinct.
We stress, too, as our world gets more unpredictable, uncertain and complex at a rate faster than we can adapt effectively. Yet, as humans, we have conscious awareness of our thoughts. This allows us to make new choices. Yet we don’t often use this capacity. Has “fight or flight” hijacked us, too?
Book of the month: The Universe Story, by Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry. Subtitled, “From the primordial flaring flash to the ecozoic era, a celebration of the unfolding of the cosmos,” The Universe Story traces the history of the universe in a way that’s accessible to non-science people. It’s one of the only books I know that elegantly integrates both natural and human history “as one,” and describes “humanity’s evolving place in the cosmos and the boundless possibilities for our future.” A nice accompaniment to this month’s ideas.